“We have found the one about whom Moses wrote in the law,
and also the prophets, Jesus son of Joseph, from Nazareth.”
To Nathanael, Nazareth didn't seem like a likely place to bring forth a Messiah. The temptation people faced was often to see in Jesus only the product of the place and family to which he was born. Those from Nazareth were themselves the most likely to agree that nothing of the magnitude about which Philip spoke could come from among them.
"Where did this man get this wisdom and these mighty works? Is not this the carpenter's son? Is not his mother called Mary?" (see Matthew 13-53-58).
This sense that a son of Nazareth could only be the sum of what was found there was a roadblock to those from that city. But Nathanael, though aware of how unlikely such a place seemed to be the place from which the Messiah came, was nevertheless still willing to listen to Philip, at least to the extent that he would himself, "Come and see". Maybe it was the enthusiasm with which Philip spoke that made him hard to resist. And what Philip invited Nathanael to do was simple and straightforward and bespoke Philip's own conviction. What Philip saw, he asserted, was there for Nathanael to see as well, if he would but go and investigate himself.
Philip said to him, “Come and see.”
We live in a world that is ready to dismiss what they believe Christianity to be and to teach. Can anything good, they ask, come from that? Let us be like Philip, ourselves fully convinced enough to invite others to see for themselves. There are yet many who are sincere in their misgivings, people with no duplicity, who are ready to receive correctives to their misunderstandings and accept the truth. They are only waiting for the invitation.
Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?”
Jesus answered and said to him,
“Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.”
Jesus knows all of us even more deeply than we know ourselves. He sensed in Nathanael the Messianic hope that he held in his heart, the hope the fig tree represented symbolically in the prophets. And because Nathanael was not duplicitous, not presenting one face here and another there, as did the Pharisees, he was able to recognize it when Jesus so deeply read his heart. Jesus spoke to him desires that he only half realized, longings he did not yet know how to express, and expressed them. He was himself the fullness of the expression of those desires.
Nathanael answered him,
“Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.”
Jesus has the power to touch hearts so deeply that words which to others seem simple and insignificant can immediately and irrevocably alter lives and the course of history. If Nathanael's response seems to us like too much too fast it can only be because we don't fully see what the words of Jesus meant to him, the way he was comprehended entirely and yet experienced only love and acceptance from Jesus himself. He did not hear that his hope was too high, or that he ought to be more realistic. Rather, he was told to raise his hopes even higher, and to center them even more completely on Jesus himself in whom he had just begun to believe.
“Do you believe
because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?
You will see greater things than this.”
And he said to him, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
you will see heaven opened and the angels of God
ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
Much more than the ladder about which Jacob dreamed, Jesus was himself the bridge that united heaven and earth, the way by which God himself spanned the gap created by sin, which was by men an uncrossable chasm. What Jacob said of Bethel was far more true of Jesus himself, "How awesome is this place! This is none other than the house of God; this is the gate of heaven" (see Genesis 28:17).
It was the destiny of Nathanael not only to see such an awesome place before him, but to himself be made one of its very foundation stones.
The wall of the city had twelve courses of stones as its foundation,
on which were inscribed the twelve names
of the twelve Apostles of the Lamb.
How glorious a destiny to be made a part of the bridge between heaven and earth, part of the only hope of man to fulfill his deepest desire for union with God! Yet this hope is not only for Apostles, but for us as well, if we will but come and see, and then invite others to discover what we have found.
So then you are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God, built on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone, in whom the whole structure, being joined together, grows into a holy temple in the Lord. In him you also are being built together into a dwelling place for God by the Spirit (see Ephesians 2:19-22).
"Come and see!"
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